Attitude of West fuels hardliners

Hani El Khidir leant back in his plush swivel chair in his air-conditioned office in Khartoum and sighed. "I hate going to Britain now," he said. "It is very sad but it is very difficult to keep going to a country where they think you are a terrorist."

Mr Khidir, a wealthy Sudanese businessman deem-ed influential enough to have his company named on the list of US sanctions against Sudan, once lived in London and still travels to Britain regularly. But in the past few years, he says, he has detected a change in attitudes towards Muslims and their religion.

"At Heathrow, why are my fingerprints taken and no one else's? We are not bad people," he said.

Such attitudes, many Sudanese claim, have fuelled their mistrust of the West. It was against this backdrop that the Gillian Gibbons case was played out yesterday.

Ordinary people on the streets of Khartoum know little about the British teacher and the teddy bear that her class named, yet she is known to be from a culture they have been told stands in direct opposition to theirs.

Sudan has been viewed with suspicion by Western leaders since 1989 when President Omar al-Bashir came to power in a coup backed by Islamists. His imposition of sharia law helped fuel a civil war with the mainly Christian south, which ended only in 2005 after two million people had died. Mr Bashir's deputy, Hassan al Turabi, invited Osama bin Laden to live in Khartoum in the 1990s.

More recently, Mr Bashir had been trying to burnish his Islamist credentials. Under pressure from the US, he expelled Bin Laden and fired Mr al-Turabi.

But the humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur has led to further friction with the West. The US labelled the brutal counter-insurgency unleashed by Mr Bashir's forces as "genocide". Every comment by Britain or the US about the need for UN peacekeepers or a no-fly zone draws a defiant response from Mr Bashir.

He has likened the possible arrival of UN peacekeepers to "Western colonisation" and promised to personally lead the jihad or holy war against them.

With elections due in 2009, Mr Bashir is determined to cling to power. Bereft of secular coalition parties, he believes he needs the support of the clerics and hardline Islamists to secure victory, and that a successful election will legitimise his rule in the eyes of the world.

Already, the Assembly of the Ulemas a semi-official group of clerics with close ties to the government has drawn parallels between the Gibbons case and those of Salman Rushdie or the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed. It has called for demonstrations against the West following prayers today.

Ahmed Rahim Hamdi, a former finance minister under Mr Bashir, said Mrs Gibbons' crime had raised wider issues about the West's attitudes towards Islam. "People do not appreciate that these issues are very important to Muslims," he said. "She should not have used that name."

For all Mr Bashir's fire and brimstone at home, he seems to care little what the rest of the world thinks of him and his nation. The key question in the coming days is which audience is more important.